Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays to everyone!

We at NLC wish you and your families a happy holiday and a great new year. We’ll be blogging again in 2007, and we can’t wait to bring you more Search marketing news and insight.

Take care!

Recently, Stephanie from the Google’s Search Quality Team posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog to clarify some of the discussion in link based popularity.

Gone are the days when link spamming tactics boost your site’s page rank. Google has dedicated link quality control people monitoring for quality; the sites that sell links to pass on its reputation (or PR vote) can no longer pass on its value.

By taking away all the shortcuts that money can buy, sites looking for links are rightfully forced to acquire links by earning them. Google recommends submitting unique content that to sites such as www.digg.com where users determine which sites offer valuable content.

For those who are not familiar with digg.com, it is a user driven social content website. When users come across a story they enjoyed, they will ‘digg’ the story. The more diggs a story has, the more exposure is receives, and thus generating a more interactive buzz in which people will exchange comments and often blog on the story.

Although Digg is currently more focused on more tech related stories, it is an example of how social media is gaining more prominence as quality is determined by consensus amongst people, rather tactics that exploit loop holes in algorithms.

Yahoo! Canada’s Martin Byrne may not believe that Search Marketing is sexy (we thought this was odd at the time), but we at non~linear disagree! If anyone needed proof, it might have been found at NLC’s very own “Improve Your Bottom Line with Search Marketing” seminar on Wednesday.

With companies such as the Shopping Channel, Staples, and Indigo in attendence, the crowd was even larger than expected. People really seemed to enjoy cocktails in non~linear’s corporate colours, as well as the interesting hor’deurves (this was held, after all, an oyster bar).

NLC was able to explain the current state of Search Marketing and how companies can get started. We appreciated your many insightful questions, and look forward to the next time we can get together with clients and friends alike.

If you couldn’t make it out this time, keep up to date right here with NLC’s blog to find out when the next Toronto Search Marketing event with NLC will take place.

Thank you to everyone who came out to spend a few hours with us. We appreciate your time, and look forward to the next time we can share our insights on Search Marketing with all of you.